What happens when literature sheds its reliance on language, when it unspools itself from text and enters the abstract realm of ink and line, suggestion and silence?

This is the proposition of Humanized, a mini art print book of ink and graphite by Dyck Cediño—known in skin art circles as the visual artist and tattooist Deadlocks—created in collaboration with Pinspired Art Souvenirs. The book is a revelation, a collection of twelve surreal black-and-white artworks rendered in Dyck’s signature fluid line work. It’s not a “book” in the traditional sense, because there are no stories, no poems, no essays in it, but it is very much a literary object. It is literature by other means.     According to the artist, Humanized “is an urge to simplify and a move towards gratitude—where the smallest gestures, the simplest words and the tiny details, make the most impact.”

“Be grateful for the small things,” accoding to Dyck, was a gentle reminder given to him by a friend, which pointed himin the right direction. “With a surge of endless information and complex stimulus we often forget that our humanity also exists in the simple and the small: spending time with your loved ones, alone drinking coffee, playing music, drawing, writing, arranging flowers, even just riding a skateboard—one can find a joy like no other.” This urge to simplify, for Dyck, has reflected itself on the images on the book: geometric shapes, repeating dots, lines, a black and white image—which then presents itself as “human” figures.

That’s the book’s story.

To say this type of project is possible in Dumaguete, our City of Literature, is to stretch what we mean by “literature,” but not unjustly. Because Humanized invites reading. It is a kind of silent narrative, where each image is not just to be looked at but entered, read, interpreted, and felt. It is a book that does not dictate meaning but conjures it. And in this era when our relationship with story is expanding—into film, into song, into graphic novels and performance, into tattooed skin— why shouldn’t line art have its say?

Truth to tell, there’s something unmistakably Dumagueteño about Dyck’s work: that marriage of intellect and emotion, of precision and intuition, of the scientific and the spiritual. A Physics graduate of Silliman University turned artist, Dyck does not so much abandon one discipline for another as he allows them to coexist. The algorithm meets the ecstatic. In Humanized, you see this convergence. The meticulousness of line, like the notation of some forgotten music; and the subject matter, with bodies folded into themselves, and with eyes that refuse to gaze back.

What is perhaps most compelling about Humanized is that it is small. It is intimate. Just one hundred copies printed. It is a book you hold not for mass consumption but as an act of curation. This, too, feels aligned with Dumaguete’s literary air, where the best things are often found in the margins: the little chapbooks sold at the back of a poetry reading, the spoken word performance in a garage, the painting hung with no fanfare in a friend’s living room. Humanized enters that lineage, of art made not to be famous, but to be felt.

Some might question: Can this be considered literature? But if literature is, as Barthes said, the question minus the answer, then Dyck’s art is literary. The book does not deliver narratives; it suggests them. It withholds as much as it reveals. There is a piece in the collection—let’s say “Merry” — where the abstract swirls verge on figuration, but stop just short, like a memory you can’t quite name. It is this ambiguity that makes the work powerful. The image becomes a page. The viewer becomes the reader.

And this brings us to Dumaguete as a City of Literature, a City of Stories. If we are to live up to these designations, we must allow our definitions to evolve. We must recognize that literature can be born not just in the typewritten word, but in gesture, in silence, in the gesture of ink on paper, where visuality and poetics merge. In this way, Humanized offers a map of where we could go: toward a literary culture that is not only inclusive of new forms, but hungry for them.

Dyck’s broader artistic practice—from his solo shows like Everlast and Deadlocks, to his surrealist contribution Thalassophilia in the Atoa exhibitions—reveals a sustained inquiry into the personal, the metaphysical, and the ecological. He works not only with media, but with community. His studio is not just a space of making, but of gathering. His earlier exhibitions in his own apartment reflect the kind of grassroots art ecology that Dumaguete has long nurtured: a do-it-yourself ethic born of necessity, yes, but also of conviction.

We are living in a time when the boundaries between the arts are dissolving. Graphic novels win literary prizes. Spoken word becomes canon. Art books become texts. Humanized stands as a beautiful symptom of that fluidity. It is, in its quiet, handcrafted way, a declaration: that literature is not only what is written, but what is felt, interpreted, and held in the hand like a mirror.

In the end, what Dyck Cediño offers with Humanized is a kind of invitation — to look, to wonder, to feel. And what better role for literature in this city of ours, than to call us back to ourselves? Not with pronouncements, but with questions. Not with stories, but with lines. Lines that twist and breathe. Lines that might, if we let them, say something human.

And in this, perhaps, we are reminded: the future of literature in Dumaguete might not be a book at all. It might be a drawing.